Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

by Alison Macleod

  We fell asleep in a far corner, under the shifting blanket of your clothes, under the concrete roof of the world, the projectors’ hum a thin memory of some music of the straining spheres. ‘Ssshhh,’ I said to you once more, ‘ssshhh,’ though neither of us in fact spoke; though you, by then, already understood: that, too soon, we would renounce even language.

  Life, a full life, is arrived at by a series of small deaths. This was the first. The coldness of my skin. The jack-in-the-box jolt of you. Love, the old seizure – I had to remember to breathe.

  There aren’t the words.

  Or, there are no longer.

  I’m restless in my sleep. I thrash. I tell you, it was like touching the skin of the world.

  You awakened to the vision of me sitting upright, somnolent, my arm outstretched like a terrible divining rod.

  Nothing was different. The party was not over. The dancing girl still danced. The couple still flirted. Ray Winstone still brooded. The voices of the other party-goers were like the ocean in a shell.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ you were saying. ‘Forget it.’

  You knew. You had always known. For the first time, my eyes were accustomed to the attenuated dark. I was staring at my own hand, its palms and fingers flat against the membrane of the world. ‘Dear God.’

  I was touching some kind of screen. My palm was pressed flat against the wrong side of a screen.

  I heard your voice, as if you were already lost to the past: ‘I’m sorry,’ you said.

  You’d deceived me.

  You would never have told me that the vanity was mine. Not the flirting woman’s. Not the ginger-haired actor’s. Not the girl’s, dancing for all to see. Not the Ray Winstone character’s, so assured he deserved sex this long night. How could I have known it was not I who beheld them, but rather they who’d simply never noticed me?

  What would you have said anyway? How could you have explained that I was the woman who was invisible? The woman at the party whom people look past. The woman who had long ago ceased to turn heads. And you, for your sins, were that woman’s lover.

  You’d been waiting for me. Were meant for me. It was Fate. Destiny writ large. On my own, a single woman of an uncertain age, I was a loose thread. A flaw in the design. An asymmetry. Together, on the other hand, you and I were that necessarily unremarkable thing: the couple people would never remember. Extras.

  Except now we were naked. At a house party. From somewhere, I could make out a barely suppressed joke. The ginger-haired actor was laughing. Even I knew: none of this was supposed to be happening. We’d broken with Fate: we’d been noticed.

  I wanted to shout at everyone, ‘Leave us alone! He’s got cancer, for God’s sake!’ as if that explained anything. But you stopped me. You held me fast in your arms. Knowledge was snapping at my heels. Of course, you didn’t have cancer. That wasn’t it at all.

  ‘That feeling,’ I started, ‘that feeling that I’m not quite… that I can’t ever remember feeling real –’

  ‘Is real,’ you said.

  And you smiled, gently. I could just see the line of your mouth, the glow of your teeth. You wanted to comfort me, but your teeth frightened me. Were they false or did they only look false?

  You were pulling your jacket over my shoulders, covering my nakedness, as Adam might have done had he found Eve in a patio garden in London instead of Paradise. I had gone so cold. ‘Ssshhh,’ you said. ‘Ssshhh.’

  ‘We’re nothing.’

  ‘We’re not nothing.’

  ‘What is “not nothing”? What does “not nothing” mean?’

  You got hold of me. Your thumbs hurt my shoulders. ‘It means me and you. Us… before. Together like that. That was not nothing.’

  ‘When did I arrive? When did I join the party?’ I was as egotistical as a child.

  ‘You are always arriving.’

  ‘Yet I never learn?’

  ‘It’s hard.’

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘I always seem to know – about the world, about it switching off. It’s just another loop. It means I’m the perpetual killjoy, the one nobody wants to find themselves in a corner with.’

  ‘So just as I’m always arriving, you’re always leaving. You’re always on your way out. Always terminal. Which means –my God, do you see? – which means you’re not really leaving me at all. We’re okay. You’re right. We’re okay. This is a loop, after all.’

  ‘Not any more it’s not.’

  ‘Don’t you see? You’re always saying that. You always feel that. But you always come back.’

  ‘No, things are different this time. And that’s not just the pessimism talking – which is precisely the problem. My pessimism is gone.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Everything’s changed. I’ve changed.’

  ‘Not everything. Never everything. Don’t go hyperbolic on me.’

  ‘You took my hand. For the first time, you took my hand.’

  I glance back nervously at the party. ‘No one saw. No one was looking.’

  ‘Can’t you see? I’m happy. I’m actually happy.’

  ‘You’re not happy. It’s not in you to be happy. You’re glad. You feel warm. You feel temporarily comforted. A little lightheaded. This is a good spell. Believe me, you are not happy.’

  ‘I’m happy. I have been since –’

  ‘Since I took your hand.’ I scanned the room for exits. Where were the exit signs? ‘I’m afraid,’ I said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You won’t be back.’

  ‘No,’ you said quietly. ‘It’s impossible. I’m not the man I was.’

  ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘You’ll know no different.’

  ‘Something in me will.’

  ‘We’ll see – You’ll see.’

  ‘All that stuff, about the world turning off. It wasn’t just the paranoia talking, was it?’

  You closed your eyes against the tears.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t what?’ you said.

  ‘Despair.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I can’t comfort you. Everything’s changed, except me. I’m as weak, as frightened as ever. You shouldn’t have fallen for someone like me. All I can really think about is myself, how much I’m afraid of the dark. How, at home, wherever home is or was, I have night lights in every socket –’

  ‘I’ll hold you. When it happens, I’ll hold on.’

  ‘I have to tell you something. If the Ray Winstone character had noticed me, I might have gone off with him. Do you know that? I don’t deserve your love. Do you remember Julia and Winston? At the end, do you remember how –’

  ‘Ssssh…’

  We were quiet for a long time. We did not bother to dress. We adopted the carelessness of exiles. I said I was worried I’d forgotten to unplug the iron before leaving my flat that afternoon, and we laughed. I said I could even tell you the brand name, and we laughed harder. If Faithfull hadn’t suddenly looked up, her seer’s eyes trained on the beyond, her sibyl’s mouth taut, we would not have known. We did not hear the footsteps. We did not see the technicians in black.

  We watched the eyes of the projectors go out, one by one, like dying stars. ‘Wish,’ you said. ‘Wish.’ You didn’t want me to see the other party-goers as they blinked into unbeing: first the dancing girl, then the flirting couple, then Ray Winstone. He looked relieved, glad to be released at last from the weight of his own unhappiness, from the undertow of his drives; glad to be no more.

  I saw the ashtray disappear.

  My last glimpse was not of you, I confess, but of Faithfull. She yawned. All of a sudden. Did you see it too? Her mouth gaped into a hole, and I understood. Here was the first rip in the fabric of the world.

  You took me in your arms. I pushed my face into your chest. I heard the humming of the spheres go quiet. I felt the crashing of your heart go still, even as the light went out in me, cell by cell, photon by photon.
The Old Testament wing had come down upon us, dark and vast as love.

  I speak to you. In the wide ocean of my thoughts, between the black waves. In the quietude that has no horizons.

  Will Taylor-Wood throw another party? A fourth party? (Was there a first? Was there a second?) You will not be there to take my wrap, or pass me a glass of punch, or light my cigarette. Do not worry. I have no illusions. I am no longer afraid.

  Hear me. I’ll be the one alone at the ashtray, the life and soul.

  Radiant Heat

  ‘No warmth is lost in the universe’

  Hildegard of Bingen

  Ron McLelland drives for IGA’s food fleet. Mostly meat and dairy. Sometimes, fresh produce. Once, in a crazy kamikaze mission, oranges from Florida and back again to Halifax in three days. He’d called his wife, Linda, from a payphone beside a take-out place shaped like a giant burger on a bun and he’d tried to describe to her twilight in the Everglades: the stink of the swamps; the wind moving like a ghost through the sawgrass; the weird calls of waders he couldn’t see in the gathering dark. He said it made him think about what it must be like to die alone, and she said, what’s with men always brooding on their own mortality? Hadn’t she told him all those caffeine pills would give him the jitters?

  Ron is one of six IGA drivers who have volunteered. He’s been allocated a twenty-eight-foot refrigeration trailer, made for long haul. He sits in his cab reading Friday’s Daily News, waiting for the programming instructions. On page 3, a waitress at the Sou’Wester Restaurant is predicting doom for the local lobster catch. ‘People just won’t feel right,’ she says. ‘Not now they won’t. Well, they’re scavengers, lobsters, aren’t they?’

  He throws the paper to the floor of the cab. For a moment, unaccountably, he feels something choking the back of his throat, like the time his brother Neil made him pay ten cents to see a picture of Marilyn Monroe almost naked, and there it was, in grisly black and white, her bloated body on an autopsy table.

  The call comes through from the depot. Minus twenty, they say. ‘Ron? That’s minus twenty.’ Deep freeze.

  Long-haulage was Ron’s solution to death, the family business. For him, it had long been an unfortunate point of familial pride that, in April 1912, his grandfather James McLelland – then a twenty-year-old completing an apprenticeship at John Snow & Co. Undertakers – had been one of the team aboard the MacKay-Bennett the morning she left port with the tons of ice, the lengths of canvas, the embalmers’ tools and the hundred coffins.

  They’d spotted the berg itself – you couldn’t miss it – a two-hundred foot twin-peaked mountain of ice. ‘Imagine it,’ James McLelland would say to Ron and Neil over his saucer of tea. ‘It was like God Himself coming at you. Not angry, just indifferent, which, I promise you, is by far the worse. I saw plenty of growlers out there too, the small bergs that hide in the swell, the ones that can hole your hull as easily as you two crunch an apple, but I’m telling you, I never seen the likes of that berg.’

  In the span of just three days, the bodies had drifted almost fifty miles from the coordinates the captain had been given. That much they could tell the papers. ‘Of course, what none of us could say is that we hit some of the bodies, there were that many. We knocked ‘em clean out of the water, five, six feet into the air. It was like something out of a crazy cartoon. You couldn’t believe it was happening.

  ‘When we dropped anchor at last, the weird thing was, most of them looked like they’d only nodded off. That’s what we said. ‘Cause of course they were frozen upright in the jackets – lot of good those things were. Just made for a slower death. And, Lord, what a mess. A terrible wreath it was all around the hull. Bodies, limbs, wreckage, pack ice… I can still see this woman in her nightdress clasping a baby to her breast. A Cape Breton lad called Pat Mundy had to jump from clamper to clamper to reach her with one of the hooks, long-jumping those floes like he did as a boy for fun in North Sydney Harbour. Couldn’t reach her. Nor the three men beside her, all of them clinging to the same chair.

  ‘We buried a hundred and sixteen at sea in burlap bags weighted with iron: all of them bodies damaged during the sinking, or smashed in the ice floe, or eaten by sea creatures. First-class passengers, of course, we embalmed and put in coffins, no matter how bad they looked.

  ‘Problem was, after only four days, we run out of the embalming fluid. The captain, he contacts the White Star Line’s New York office; says they have to send more supplies and a second ship. As it was, the best we could do for the steerage folk was to wrap them up in canvas; and for the crew, to lay them out on the deck, covered with tarps. With the wind at night and the ship wallowing on the rollers, you could have sworn they were breathing still, poor devils.

  ‘Three hundred and six bodies. That was the cargo.’

  The day after Ron’s thirteenth birthday, James McLelland himself would be waked, open casket, in the Serenity Room of McLelland & Sons Family Funeral Home. He would wear on his face the taut cosmetic expression of unwrinkled peace that had been his own point of professional pride. He would never know that only five years on, his eldest grandson, Ron, would fail his exams. All of them. Pathology. Restorative Art. Funeral Rites. Mortuary Law. Embalming Theory and Practice. Merchandising and Management. He would not dream that, at the age of eighteen, Ron would boast nothing more than a high-school diploma and a heavy-goods driving licence. ‘And how far do you think that’s going to get you in this day and age, Ron?’ Ron’s dad, James’s son, shouted over the smashed body of a thirty-year-old father of three. ‘You tell me that.’

  ‘Far,’ said Ron, his chest heaving. ‘Far from here.’

  When Kurt arrives at JFK Airport, his flight number is already flashing on the monitors. The baggage belts have broken down. The line at the check-in doubles and redoubles on itself. Children sleep on soft-sided matching luggage. Middle-aged men rest their paunches on abandoned ticket counters. He feels he’s walked into a B-movie where the population is in the grip of the dreaded E-Force. ‘E’, a dome-headed scientist will explain to his frightened but winsome technician, ‘is for “Entropy”,’ and she will duly scream.

  ‘Excuse me, bitte,’ Kurt says, faltering loudly. ‘Excuse me. My wife is, right now, yes, a baby having in Geneva. The plane leaves. Excuse me –’ He moves slowly up the line, blushing at the success of the lie.

  ‘Hey, bub.’ Something thumps his arm. He stops short, turns around. A stocky man hidden behind tinted glasses and sideburns from 1976 reaches into his breastpocket. Kurt steps back. Air rage. This is where it all begins. ‘See this?’ Kurt looks down. A fat Cuban cigar. ‘No, don’t thank me, just name the kid after me –Max, since you’re not asking.’ Someone slaps him on the back as he clambers over a barrier. An elderly woman thrusts a box of brandy-filled chocolates under his arm. ‘For your wife,’ she says, squeezing his hand. Before he knows it, he’s at the check-in desk. He loves Americans.

  A blonde in a crisp blue blazer reaches for his documents. ‘Thank you, Dr Zucker. You want gate 21. The last one.’ She leans across the desk and smiles. ‘So leg it.’

  He sprints, laptop and portable CD player banging at his hip. He clears the gate, nods sheepishly to the stewardess, and falls into his seat aboard the Boeing MD-11 at six minutes past eight in the evening, only ten minutes before take-off.

  ‘I see you’ve noticed my socks.’ It’s his neighbour in 18A. He nods to his bright purple feet, wriggling his toes. ‘Before you ask, I’m not Donny Osmond. Let’s clear that up right away.’

  Kurt nods, fumbles for his CD player, loads it with Bowie’s Young Americans as the plane begins to taxi down the runway.

  ‘So what takes you to Geneva? Sorry. Didn’t get your name.’

  ‘Kurt. A conference. At CERN.’ A steward stops and reminds him to turn off the CD player for take-off. There is no escape after all.

  ‘Kurt? Hal. I’ve heard of that. Quantum foam, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You giving a paper, Kurt?’
>
  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Got a title?’

  ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘ “Thermalization in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Collisions. Subtitle: Energy Densities and Entropy Production.” ’

  ‘It’s got a ring to it.’

  Kurt smiles wanly. The conversation dies.

  His passion is particle accelerators – the generation of high-energy systems. In the lab at Brookhaven, he bears witness to explosions of heat and light that have not been possible since the early days of the universe. But there’s more to it than that because privately, deeply, irrationally, Kurt Zucker struggles against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Against the tyranny of entropy.

  On the armrest, Hal’s arm is warm against his.

  A young fisherman called Ian shares hot tea from his thermos. He’s telling Ron that the exclusion zone goes on for ever. His father, he says, went out early on Thursday, ‘bout three in the morning. ‘The whole bay is glowing yellow from the flares, right? And the phone starts ringing and my old man says he’s going. Won’t let me go. But in less than an hour, he’s back, you know, peeling off the oilskins. “Can’t do it,” he’s saying. “It’s wreckage out there. Just wreckage,” and I know he means he’s found no one, no one alive. He looks at me and his eyes are filling up. “I don’t know what to do,” he says. “Don’t go back, Dad,” I says. “The military, they’re here.” “You don’t understand,” he says. “I got a piece of a woman in the boat. A piece of a woman.” ’

  Ian and Ron are standing on the bright sweep of ancient granite that disappears in a reef under the rim of St Margaret’s Bay. They can smell jet fuel on the wind. Past the lighthouse, breakers crash like the backs of breaching whales.

  ‘Can’t be easy for them divers,’ says Ian. Ron shakes his head, zips up his jacket all the way to his Adam’s apple. There’s been rain. High winds. Two-metre swells. They’re down there, he thinks, at sixty metres, on tethers, the water close to freezing –that’s what one of the guys was telling him at the makeshift canteen. They’re in weighted boots so they can stand up on the seabed, because it’s not flat like you imagine. It’s grey slate lined with ridges and deep valleys. It’s studded with granite boulders that loom up sudden. Visibility is only a few metres. ‘A nightmare,’ the diver told Ron.